How to Cut Foam

everybody John Grimm's one here this video is all about a part green foam cases that hold our knives both the Norseman and the Rask now we used to buy these from somebody else and they were okay we wanted a bit more control on tolerances and betterment of it so now we're making them ourselves I've been collecting footage for probably six months that we've been doing this and now that we have air in the holding the camera behind you she's actually getting through all that footage and showing you [Music] we're using a one of these lakeshore carbide engraving tools to cut into the foam and it's working very very well so yeah they're going super well so now that we have full control over our own cases we were getting these before not anymore we also found a new color so we're gonna probably go with green instead of this pink I was hoping it would be red but it's not red it's pink so go with the green and then the knife it's super well and up till now we've been going we've been just putting our stuff on top and I've never been happy with it because sometimes it'll get pinched in the in the edge there and you know it's not a super great presentation so when you open it you have to move these before you can even see the prized possession the knife so we're trying to figure out ways you know tape it to the top tape it to the bottom all different possibilities and then eventually Eric had an excellent idea I want to share with you guys Eric's like why don't we just put a little cutout here and with an engraving lift here so that now we can put all the cool stuff underneath and you can even you know when we ship it will probably move it like that so you can see something underneath more visual cues and then he can be like Oh left here who's not gonna do that so that works really well we actually lost a lot of suction like without this thing it's suctions in there very very very well and that's really hard to get out actually but I think this will work really great and then the new cases are gonna have an egg egg carton foam tape to the lid so it's gonna pad and protect the top of the night bit by bit we're getting cool stickers made up here everything's coming together [Music] we've now got an egg crate foam custom-made for the lid which I think use this one because it's chamfered I think it's gonna cup the knife perfectly cuz they used to rattle just a little bit if you go like this I didn't like that Eric hated that so this custom-made create foam that we had cut should just give it just that much careful padding to make it work nicely I love it so after looking long and hard we got this foam from foam fit tools.com really happy with their service shipping to Canada was kind of expensive but that's Canada for you so we weren't quite super happy with the red that we got before so we asked Pete at foam fed tools see any other colors and he told me he had green so I am super happy with this green color it's like a solid lime green cannot wait to cut this up and try them out right now I think that's gonna be a solid color for us the Reds to pink and also I was getting some burs around the corners with the tool I was using before so Datron saw that and sent us this awesome end mill that they made specifically for foam it's got polished flutes three flute er it's metric was a three millimeter I think so just under 1/8 of an inch nice long reach that's gonna work very well for us the green ones turned out fantastic I love the green having a bit of a problem with that new animal same problem I was having before with the old end mill is that especially when doing this cut out this operation these long chips come out and then right at the end the end mill comes up and it starts wrapping this and it wraps it right around the tool like crazy and then it fans around and it goes in see how this edge is radiused all the way around not good in a perfect world if it looked consistent and perfect all the time it might be cool but it's not see it did it a little bit right here so that's because these stringers are going around the tool and it's getting dragged around there so we had I think four good ones and two with this problem this one had it right on the end there and that's not acceptable so I think I think this is the problem and I need to go in instead of doing a straight tool path like that I need to do either an adaptive tool path or just a parallel angled lines or something just to make these smaller and then I think that'll work make chips not long strings check out this idea so if we finish the outside of the pocket first which is counter-intuitive to machining thinking and then clear out the inside normally it with metal you would clear out the inside and then finish the outside I'm gonna do it backwards so I like to hide the model sometimes I'll put the stock is transparent or not let's do not first one if we hide the toolpath finish the pocket first and then it's gonna come in and do its this is a 3d parallel tool path with a 45-degree thing and this is gonna make nice short chips not these long stringers and look at that I can tell that it is cleared out the entire thing nothing left over that's North awesome [Music] here's a quick side by side of the red / pink versus the green now let's take a quick look at edge quality this is with that lakeshore carbide 3 flute gold coated end mill just a bit frayed a bit burry pretty crisp that - on 10 mill leaves a way crisper edged utterly fantastic quality and once you see them side by side you really tell the difference this is actually the first moment I've had to have them side by side definitely worth it definitely cool also notice how the Oh on Grimm's Bowl looks a little bit different than the rest and this is a good one we were having some problems where the Oh would kind of tear away because the the outside is so thin right so we took out it's got an outside circle and an inside circle we took out the inside one for a few of them didn't really love it because he was doing the I think he was doing the outside first and then it was cutting the inside circle and there just wasn't enough meat left over so Eric had the great idea to reverse the direction to do the the inside first and then do the outside and that totally fixed it so it's just a process change that now makes the little tiny detail that much better so we make them six at a time in the sheet and next step is to break them off they're all gonna have clappy things because since it's being vacuumed down you can actually see the grid pattern you can't break through or I'll see you lose vacuum and the whole thing flies off so we left 50 foul on the bottom and then now we have to go over to the little grinder and Barry's going to show us how he does that [Music] so [Music] half of the reason is to get rid of that burr the other half yeah we have a pretty large chamfer on here because the inside of the case is actually radius so we found that without a big chamfer the case is not sitting flat and it's actually like like compressing in the middle and it's it's just not great [Applause] now I can't get this one out because it doesn't have my little lift here thing they're so suction in there there we go so yeah so we need a pretty large chamfer and I mean I'll admit the quality of the you know sanding it's very hand done it's very quick and dirty I don't I don't mind I don't care really maybe we'll tighten it up as we go along so it's been a few weeks since the last time I filmed about these cases made a bunch of tiny little tweaks and they're getting better and better turn the vacuum off no this one's done turn the Machine off SuperDuper fantastically happy with how these are turning out changing the way the tool path goes changing the way they engraving I think I already talked about that little things like raising up the floor for the Torx wrench right here because the body touches but then the shaft was too loose so then it would tip down but now I raised up the floor there so that it sits perfectly flush change the toolpath strategy frame here to make the chips nice and small because those long stringy chips were wrapping around the tool and we're causing rubbing and burning problems around here so optimize the tool path all kinds of little things even made the finger hole a little bit bigger having full control is absolutely fantastic it's kind of funny it actually suctions the grid pattern into the bottom but after like 20 minutes it pops back up it's no big deal at all yeah so just today I've made that and all of these and yesterday I made about the same amount so when you break it out it's got this this burr right here right that's not cool and it also doesn't fit into the case that way so we used to have Barry do the sanding on the sandpaper and then I kind of had a genius idea he is a woodworker by trade so he used his router table with a corner rounding bit to come in and corn around the bottom and you know admittedly he says it's tricky to get it perfect every time I'm willing to accept that for now and we'll get better and better over time but yeah he said he played around and messed with the the fence and the way that he holds it and and it's getting a very fantastic corner round on the bottom there so I'm really happy with that so that is awesome and I'm just so happy with how these are turning out and now the only only things that bug me are these little flappy's which we usually pick away if we if we remember we're bearing with sanding the corners with the belt sander it works okay but it's a little very inconsistent in how it works so he has a table router I guess it's called with a corner rounding bit or a round over bit of what he can set this on the table and do the rounding and it's got like one of those bearings on the top that kind of rolls around and follows it and that's how we're doing it now and they look awesome I've been filming this video about the foam for the past two months or so so final thoughts I think I can wrap up the video now I'm pretty happy with how they turned out I don't think there's too much more to add I've made dozens of changes dozens of tweaks the new diet Ron and mill that I'm pretty sure I showed is utterly fantastic it does exactly what I needed to do and the lakeshore engraving end mill is just tight just perfect and everything about cutting foam is backwards than what you think it's gonna be it's backwards the cutting metal like to rough out this pocket with cutting metal you would wrap out the pocket first and then do a finish pass around the outside with fold completely backwards I found it's best to do the finish pass first plunge it rotate around to the finish fast and then hog out the material on the inside and that works phenomenally totally backwards thinking the other trick which my friend Brad souther told me and yes Brad I'm sharing a secret is with milling you have the choice to do conventional milling or climb milling now with metal I use climb milling for everything not even a question has to be climb willy-nilly with foam you want the opposite you want conventional billing so inside the hole you want to go clockwise and outside of us of a diameter like on the outside of this you want to go counterclockwise which is backwards than metal you want to go conventional and that works just great would fall because it for some reason foam does not cut in the climb milling it just doesn't just rub some moves out of the way so go to my final thoughts with the foam and again I got it from foam pit tools.com from peat a super happy super great result I did have one or two sheets that delaminate a little bit but I fed back to the details to him and he sent me another sheet replacement for free and he's fixing the problem so it's you know good feedback back and forth very very happy with the tools super happy with this hopefully this video was helpful to you guys I know it's a very broad spectrum kind of you could use this for anything and now that we make our own we want to start using it for everything - we got to make you know phone cases for upcoming projects like pencil flashlights we for all I know we're gonna need a dedicated machine just to cut both thanks for watching you guys we're absolutely loving these folks I know you guys are too you the customer as you can see in the video we started with the blue ones and they were with the red ones the pink ones and then several degrees SuperDuper happy thanks for watching everybody like this video subscribe and lots more coming up thanks [Music]

Channel: JohnGrimsmo

Views: 616,169

Keywords: norseman, rask, grimsmo knives, damasteel, grimsmo norseman, grimsmo rask, erik grimsmo, knife life, precision, foam, cases, endmills, datron, how to, foam fit tools

Id: YAgT8oNwKhQ

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2018